A collection of tips, tricks and snips. A proud Blosxom weblog. All code. No cruft.

Thu, 13 Jul 2017

I’m not entirely certain when BackTrack/Kali began behaving more like a regular desktop distro but I seem to recall that originally, networking subsystems were down when you booted up into Run Level 3. It was up to you to turn on the interfaces and fire up a GUI if such was desired. IMO, that’s precisely how it should be. I get it. Most of us aren’t ever won’t ever find ourselves in a clandestine lot, inside of a snack and caffeine filled, non-descript, conversion van with a Yagi pointed at the bubble-window, ready to pilfer innocent datums just trying to get by in this lossy-protocoled, collision-rife, world.

Rather, very many of us just want the stinking box online so we can run through our tutorials and hack our own intentionally vulnerable VMs. A thorough taste of hacking’s un-glamorous underbelly is quite enough for many.

I’m confident that the BT fora were inundated with fledgling hackers complaining that their fresh install couldn’t find WiFi or didn’t load the desktop. However, I feel that distros dedicated to the Red Team should try to instill good habits. Having your machine boot and activate an interface announcing your presence and spewing out MAC and hostname is bad for business. Booting into a (comparatively) heavy GUI is also not where I want to begin.

Let’s imagine that we’re trying to crack into a thing. Don’t we want to apply maximal CPU resources, rather than having GUI elements bringing little beyond cost? If you notice, very many of the related tools still live on the CLI. The typical course of development (e.g.: Nmap, Metasploit) is that the CLI version is thoroughly developed before someone drops a GUI atop (respectively: Zenmap, Armitage).

So let’s take our Kali and make a few quick changes. We want to boot up in text/CLI mode and we want networking left off until we choose to make noise. Further, we want to randomize our MAC address and hostname at every boot.

Sun, 19 Feb 2017

While the overall telos of this blog is to, generally speaking, convey code snippets and inspire the personal projects of others, today we’re going to do something a smidgeon different.

This will be a layman’s look at varied dimensions of information security from a comfortable distance. Over the years, I’ve secured servers, operating systems, medical data, networks, communications and I’ve unsecured many of these same things. The topics are too sprawling to be covered in a quick summary — but let’s find a point of entry.

Those of us who are passionate about information security are well aware of how daunting is the situation. For newcomers, it sometimes seems rather impossible. Pick any subject and there are probably well-informed and convincing experts in diametric equidistance from any “happy medium”.

Let’s imagine that (like most of us) you don’t have anything spectacular to protect. However, you dislike the idea of our ever-dissolving privacy. Therefore you want to encrypt communications. Maybe you begin to use Signal. However, there are criticisms that there is a “backdoor” (there is not). Further, there are accusations that open source projects are coded by those who can’t get real jobs. Conversely, open source projects are widely open for peer review. If it worries one enough they are free to review code themselves.

PGP can encrypt content but concerns surround algorithmic selections. Some are worried about metadata crumbs. Of course, there’s nothing preventing the frequent switching of keys and email addresses. You could use BitMessage, any number of chat solutions or drop at paste bins.

Let’s leave those concerns aside for when you’ve figured out what you’re intending to protect. These arguments surround any subject in information security and we’re not going to investigate them on a case by case basis. Least, not in this post.

At the coarsest granularity, the question is analogous to the practicality of locking your doors or sealing your post envelopes. Should I take measures toward privacy?

My opinion is rather predictable: of course you should!

There’s a very pragmatic explanation. If there ever comes a day when you should like to communicate privately, that’s a terrible time to start learning.

Take the easy road and start using some of the myriad tools and services available.

Should you decide to take InfoSec seriously, you’ll need to define a threat model.
That is: What am I protecting? From whom am I protecting? (e.g. what are probable attack vectors?)

That’s where you need to make choices about trusting products, protocols, methods, algorithms, companies, servers, et cet. Those are all exciting subjects to explore but all too often brushing up against them can be exasperating and cause premature burn-out.

That in mind, let’s employ the philosophy that any effort toward security is better than none and take a look at a few points where one might get wetted-toes.

If you have questions or want specific advice, there are several ways below to initiate a secure conversation with me.

[ n.b. Wickr’s .deb package seeks a unicode library (libicu52) which is not available to a recent Kali (or anything) install; .deb file is based on Ubuntu’s 2014 LTS release.Wickr in a Docker container ]

Mon, 02 Jan 2017

The server we’re investigating in this scenario was chosen for being a dedicated box in a country that has quite tight privacy laws. And it was a great deal offered on LEB.

So herein is the fascinating bit. The rig took a few days for the provider to set up and, upon completion, the password for SSHing into the root account was emailed out. (o_0)

In very security-minded considerations, that means that there was a window of opportunity for bad guys to work on guessing the password before its owner even tuned in. That window remains open until the server is better secured. Luckily, there was a nice interface for reinstalling the OS permitting its purchaser to select a password.

My preferred approach was to script the basic lock-down so that we can reinstall the base OS and immediately start closing gaps.

Thu, 30 May 2013

In this writer’s opinion, it is vitally important that we take reasonable measures now to help insure anonymity, lest we create a situation where privacy no longer exists, and the simple want of, becomes suspicious.

Here’s how to configure your browser to automatically use a search engine that respects your privacy.

Chrome:

Click Settings.

Click “Set pages” in the “On startup” section.

Enter https://ixquick.com/eng/ in the “Add a new page” text field.

Click OK.

Click “Manage search engines…”

At the bottom of the “Search Engines” dialog, click in the “Add a new search engine” field.

Mon, 20 May 2013

I have finished (more-or-less) making a demo for the Xdebug togglin’ add-on/extension that I’ve developed.

One hundred percent of the feedback about this project has been from Chrome users. Therefore, the Chrome extension has advanced with the new features (v2.0), allowing selective en/dis-ableing portions of Xdebug’s output. That is you can set Xdebug to firehose mode (spitting out everything) and then squelch anything not immediately needed at the browser layer. The other information remains present, hidden in the background, available if you decide that you need to have a look.

The Firefox version is still at v1.2 but will be brought up to speed as time permits.

If you want that firehose mode for Xdebug, here’s a sample of some settings for your configuration ‘.ini’ file.